Closed image formats (was: Discferret Broken?)

This is a very important point - if you are archiving disks for historical reasons, you have to realize that like the original systems, the tools you are using now will eventually become difficult if not impossible to use on future "modern" hardware. It then becomes critical to be able to recover the data by other means. Another big reason to use a documented format is that you may want/need to do other things with the data besides write it back to original format disks ... the original system may not be available or working. It may not have the means to transfer data other than by reading it's floppies. You may be trying to extract files from the disk, or run it under emulation. To do these things, you need to be able to access the data directly from the image file, and to fully understand how that data is organized. Also, don't assume it will be "the same level" - It may be "worse level" It may be easier to read data from the original documented-format disks than to reverse engineer the closed proprietary image file. This becomes a major issue when all you have left is the image file. This is why I specifically documented and placed the ImageDisk file format into the public domain. The ability to do this was one of my primary motivations in creating the program. Nobody owns the format, and nobody can ever restrict what you do with it. I strongly urge anyone who is creating other disk/data imaging systems to do the same. -- dave12 (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com (dot) com Classic computers: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/